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Although I am making slow and steady progress through the backlog of photos from months past, I thought it was time to share something a little more up to date. Winter, it seems, has been switched on in the UK. This week I am not sure that temperatures have made it more than one degree above freezing where I live. However, combined with a week of working on an evening shift pattern, this means fun with the macro lens in our icy garden. I am starting to get the measure of both this lens (although I curse it for not having IS) and my own ability to hold completely still whilst taking a macro shot. It’s still a skill very much in need of practice, but these shots are some of the sharpest i’ve managed yet and I’m quite proud of them.

About a month ago (I am so behind), we visited the Peak District. We’d spent a couple of days there in October last year and sort of fell for it a little. It has a number of winning factors: it’s about 2hrs from home, it’s not quite like anywhere else, and there’s plenty to do. We stayed in a village called Castleton, in an excellent B&B which was an easy walk away from an impressive amount of equally impressive pubs. Could you ask for more?

This post and the next two are all from our 2/3 days there.

When we got to the Peak District, the weather was leaving much to be desired. Especially for those of us who were meant to be taking a hot air balloon flight. We realised quite early on that it wasn’t going to happen, so we went to look at a road that had been destroyed by a landslide instead – as you do in these situations. I’d actually been wanting to have a look since I read about it, because nothing spells out interesting photography like a good natural disaster with human implications. On this basis, and coupled with the conditions, I knew I wanted to go for black and white, journalistic-style images. And thanks to a little homework on apertures, I knew much more about what to aim for to control my depth of field for the shots I had in mind.